Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org
- On the web:
- https://hackscience.education/
Director of Teaching and Learning Innovation at a community college in New England
Retired k-12 science/ math/ technology teacher/ technology integration specialist/ coordinator
Joined Nov 2022
We get caught up in "Did my students meet the expectation?" The more interesting questions are "What did they learn that I didn't expect?" "What do they know that was not captured?"
Faculty often have a most favored pedagogy. it may not be anyone else's favorite, but that does not dissuade them from using it... over and over... and over.
The design of the physical spaces (lighting, windows, technology tools, air flow, temperature, access to water and rest rooms, arrangement of desks) in classrooms affects learing in ways we often do not recognize.
Schools, the institutions we have adopted for teaching, are a rather recent human invention, and may not be the best. Scholars have documented how teaching occurs in societies other than school and found some similarities; western schools have largely ignored that knowledge.
While we cannot attribute a purpose to any naturally occurring phenomenon, humans with our social and pattern-finding brains do look at our history and find we evolved “for” social interaction. We are good at it.
“I taught it, but they didn’t learn it.” Those teachers annoy me.
Not all students arrive with the same motivation, goals, and experiences as the teacher did when they first entered the field.
We become teachers because we are good at something. We care about our field, have studied it with purpose, and are prepared to share our expertise with others.
The best teachers approach new students, new curriculum, new strategies, and new colleagues as a and opportunity to more deeply explore ahat they know about teaching learning.
Students who engage with the course content, their classmates, and their instructors in a reflective and active manner will gain the most from the course. This observation is as accurate for online learners as it is for traditional learners.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." -Stephen Jay Gould
Computers can easily do the things that are hard for humans, and the things easy for humans are hard for computers. This is sometimes called Moravec’s paradox.
The most successful forms of intelligence that humans have discovered appears to be the symbiosis (although the biology student in me recoils at the use of the term) of humans and computers.
Correlation, association, causation. Humans are not good at differentiating these.
Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor" is particularly true in education.
No c-level executive manages, works, and leads within a vacuum. At the highest level—decisions are made to satisfy the needs and limitations of the entire organization, so they often take "bad news" to those who report to them.
AI doe bring "the hard problem" into focus, but I am increasingly convinced it isn't conscious.
- On the web:
- https://hackscience.education/
Director of Teaching and Learning Innovation at a community college in New England
Retired k-12 science/ math/ technology teacher/ technology integration specialist/ coordinator
Joined Nov 2022
